When Jon Heder arrives at the Four Seasons restaurant in Beverly Hills, California no one pays him much mind. Not that they would. It is late Friday afternoon, the blue-haired hour, a time for aged, well-healed women and their three martini lunches. These women comes with Neiman Marcus shopping bags in tow and several hundred thousand dollars worth of overdraft protection. Heder comes with a pair of jeans and an old coat. Jeans and an old coat? Of course, they didn't notice him. Friday afternoon at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, California is as far from Napoleon Dynamite country as one can get without the use of a rocket ship.

And even if things were different, even if he were dropped off in the middle of Preston, Idaho—the very place they shot that film—one suspects he would still be somewhat anonymous. Gone now are those ridiculous glasses and the now legendary 'Vote For Pedro' T-shirt. Gone is the red afro that wasn't even red, but some kind of accidental product of the two perms it took to turn his hair into a frizzy, serpentine mass and the bleaching that took place along the way and the shitty film stock and the Idaho sun that picked up the bleach and made his whole curly coif appear like a burning bush caught in a bad bar fight.

In person, he appears considerably taller than on film, long and lean and 28 years old. His hair is shaggy and bowl cut and hangs low across his eyes. He has bright eyes that do not squint, and a generous, toothy grin. No, in person, he does not look particularly dynamite. If he looks like anything, it's a tourist who accidentally stumbled into the Four Seasons and once he gets a look at the prices on the menu, he'll stumble on his way right out again.

Which is, after all, mostly the point. Napoleon Dynamite has become a cult classic and Heder, by extension, a cult phenomena. To avoid the downside of that phenomena we have chosen to at the Four Seasons because it seems to be as close to an absolute guarantee of Heder anonymity and interview quietude as could be found in Los Angeles. So it comes as something of a surprise that not twenty minutes into our chat, as the waitress—a women clearly pushing fifty herself—leans in close to Jon, setting down some multi-tiered tuna concoction in front of him, and coos: "Nothing but the best for my favorite dynamite."

Okay, so maybe there are some similarities. For instance, Heder is happy talking about ligers, the half-tiger/half-lion beast famous from Napoleon Dynamite. He loves the idea of UFOs and believes there's life on other planets. He grew up as a boy scout and remembers, on a camping trip to the Pacific Northwest, keeping an eye out for Bigfoot. "Maybe it's geeky," he says, "But I love mystery. I want to always feel like whatever's around the next corner is unexpected. What I really don't understand is why everyone's not into it."

Heder is also something of a klutz. Normal objects confound him. When he goes to cross his long legs, his knees bump the table. The menu is apparently a tricky affair, clearly written in a language he does not yet speak. "I don't know what half of this stuff means," he says, pushing the menu aside and accidentally sideswiping a water glass. The glass topples and water spills onto the table and drips onto his pants and he lets out a loud "Gosh." It is the "Gosh" that really gives him away. See, this is no ordinary "Gosh." It starts out with the hard "G" of serious perturbation, followed by a short "O" which quickly bleeds into the tell-tale arrogant and edgy "sh" of an elderly grandmother going berserk in a public library. It is the same kind of nerd profanity that launched a thousand websites. It is the "Gosh" of Napoleon Dynamite. It is that "Gosh."

The reason for the "Gosh," for his fish-out-of-water demeanor, is not affect. Heder is a greenhorn, a tenderfoot, as unlikely a Hollywood success story as has ever been written. He was born in Colorado, raised in Salem, Oregon. His parents are Mormon and Heder was brought up in the rigid strictures of that faith. It is a religion that abhors profanity, thus "gosh" instead of "God," thus "friggin idiot" instead of "fucking moron." It is also a religion that values purity of body and Heder, in compliance with these values, does not drink or drug or smoke or, excluding the occasional Dr. Pepper lapse, caffeinate. Beneath his regular clothes, he wears the ritual long underwear known in Mormon parlance as "garments." When he was 19, after his first year of college, Heder went to Tokyo on the requisite Mormon proselytizing sojourn known as "a mission." His mission lasted two years and serves as something of a dividing line in his life. "It wasn't like they dropped me from a helicopter with a loin cloth and a Swiss Army knife and told me to survive," says Heder, "but it was hard. I had to learn the language. It was the first time I was really on my own and I had to learn all those basic independence skills. It serves as something of a dividing line in my life. Everything is either pre-mission or post-mission." For his effort he can count eleven converts, many of whom he still keeps in contact with to this day.

Since there are not too many practicing Mormon is Los Angeles, his recent transplantation still causes him some discomfort. "I kind of like staying out of the limelight," he says. "I hardly ever go to Hollywood parties. I'm just not used to parties. I like to party, I guess. What does it mean to party? I mean, I like to have fun, but I don't drink and I don't run around naked. Alone, I do. But, you know, not in front of people. I'm still living a very non-Hollywood life. I live in an apartment with termites and a leaky roof. I drive a crappy car."

When I ask him if he thinks he's living the typical life of a guy who just graduated from college, he looks down and plays with his food and eventually says, "Well, sort of, I did buy my crappy car for cash."

Heder has always been creative. "I have a twin brother," he recounts, "growing up we were always into art. Most of my life I thought I was going to be an artist—whatever that meant. I remember thinking, well, what does an artist do? I don't really dig painting, and I know artists like to paint, I just like to draw. But in high school I discovered video and I loved making videos."

"Pornographic stuff?"
"Yeah," he admits. "I was like, well, this is just to cover the bills right now. Pay the rent, cause my dad was—well, you know."

Okay, so they weren't pornographic, but they were art or arty or enough to catch his attention. He made them all the way through high school, mostly using the camera to fulfill school assignments, book reports, that sort of thing. "My biggest production was for Jack London's White Fang," he says. "I got a 100 percent and—because the teacher loved it—extra credit." Jon Heder starred in a movie that to date has earned over 45 million, but still beams with pride when he remembers how much his high school teacher liked his book report.

It was also in high school that his love of film—and the possibilities of film—began to deepen. He became a huge Cohen brothers fan. Raising Arizona and Hudsucker Proxy became favorite flicks. "Their movies are such a beautiful twist on the mundane. The characters weren't luxurious, pretty people. They had a backward, gritty, salty charm that not everyone liked. That's what I liked. They weren't mainstream. The movies weren't mainstream. And they were the first movies I saw that were like the movies I would want to make."

When it was time to go to college—of course, as a Mormon, he chose to attend Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City—he had already decided to major in film, not that he was all too certain what that entailed. "My first semester there I took an intro to film class that really opened my eyes. It was the first time I saw Citizen Kane, and sure, it's a classic, black and white, considered the best and you can see why. But I also saw stuff like Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern. That was so different, so unlike any film I could imagine myself liking, but I loved it."
It was in one of those classes that he met his wife Kristen (Tk-Check), a documentary filmmaker whom he married three years ago. It was also in one of those classes that he met a director named Jared Hess and it was Hess and his wife Jerusha who had written a short film called Peluca that was nine minutes long and shot in black and white. In 2002, Peluca was one of 12 flicks selected to show at the alternative, alternative film festival Slam Dance. The official history, found on the Slam Dance website (www.slamdance.com) and known as the "warstory," reads: "Our film was shot in 2 days on location in Preston, Idaho. The black and white 16mm negative was exposed improperly resulting in some of the grainiest images you’ll ever see. Key props like the fanny-pack were found at the thrift store minutes before our first take."

With the success of Peluca, Hess and company managed to borrow $200,000 from a friend's older brother. They took that money and went back to Idaho and shot Napoleon Dynamite under well, mildly hostile circumstances. "There was no place to eat," recalls Heder. "I didn't have a car. I had to ride Pedro's Sledgehammer to McDonalds every night." And then that film screened at Sundance and Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times : "There is a kind of studied stupidity that sometimes passes as humor, and "Napoleon Dynamite" pushes it as far as it can go." Todd McCarthy of Variety also gave 'em hell: "There are lots of laughs for those who enjoy the sight of bottom dwellers doing stupid things that make them look even more idiotic."

But not everyone felt that way. The audience—as opposed to the critics—loved it. In fact, they loved it so much that Fox Searchlight got into a bidding war with Warner Independent Pictures, winning out with a last minute offer of three million dollars. The film was in theaters by the summer of 2004. Stephen Preston, writing in the Washington Post, summed up the reaction nicely: "It's a signal irony that a movie shot for $200,000 by a Mormon couple in Idaho opens nationally on the same day as Steven Spielberg's $100 million "The Terminal" and that "Napoleon Dynamite" is every inch the superior product." And yeah, it outlasted Terminal, out-lasted almost all the other gleeful summer fare. I mean, it's freaking the winter of 2006 and the damn thing is still in the upper portion of Netflix top 100.

It was also at Sundance that Heder's life began to change. "Jared kind of warned me. He was like, dude, I don't know how much you thought about it, but if the movie does well, you do know you're gonna get hooked up. I went, cool. But I had no idea. After the first screening, all kinds of people wanted to meet me. People coming up to me and handing me business cards. I got them from producers, agents, managers—it was just comedy." And if you're looking for a parable of sorts, well here it is: After the success of Napoleon Dynamite at Sundance, Heder signed with the Creative Artist Agency—the biggest, baddest agency around—and then went back to BYU to finish his last semester of school.

When he finally did move to Los Angeles, the first project he signed on was a bit part in Just Like Heaven. It's a film he did for a number of reasons. "A lot of the scripts I saw were either bad or, if I was in the lead role, there were content problems." Content problems, mean anything that conflicts with his faith. "Just like Heaven was clean," he says. One would assume the search for clean projects might hamper his chances, but that turns out not to be the case.

Currently, Heder has five movies coming out, including Old School writer/director Todd Phillips's School For Scoundrels in which he plays a down-on-his-luck meter reader who enrolls in a confidence building class to win the girl of his dreams, only to find out that the guy teaching the class (Billy Bob Thornton) has his sights set on the same gal. Phillips had written a rough draft of the script with Thornton in mind for the lead when a friend took him to see Napoleon Dynamite. "I thought it was the best comedic performance I'd seen if five years," says Phillips, "the first thing I did afterwards was rewrite the Scoundrels script with Heder as the other lead."

He's not alone in his admiration. Dennis Dugan, the same director who made Happy Gilmore and Big Daddy, was casting the even worse than the Bad News Bears softball saga Benchwarmers, which co-stars David Spade and Rob Schneider, when someone brought up Heder's name. "I just went crazy," recalls Dugan, "I had no idea we could get him for this role."

Both directors talk about Heder's incredible work ethic and uncanny abilities. "When you're paying him," says Dugan, "he's there working for you—and that's not how it usually goes. He's always the first guy on the set, he doesn't complain, he does his homework, his ideas are good, and he's just so damn funny." When I ask if Heder's Mormonism got in the way of anything, Dugan told me a story. "My fifteen year old son was in the hospital, so I decided to take this big piece of cardboard and have everyone in the cast write the filthiest get-well messages imaginable. David Spade, Adam Sandler, Jon Lovitz—you can just imagine the things they wrote. I didn't know what Jon was going to do, I didn't know if he'd even want any part of it. He signed it. He didn't go the filth route, but he was funny." It is also worth noting that both directors admit to trying to get him to do Napoleon Dynamite lines between takes.

When lunch ends, we leave the restaurant and pass our tickets to the valet and join a half-dozen other folks in the driveway waiting for their cars. We're out there not more than thirty seconds when an older, African-American women rushes over to Heder, grabbing his hand and shaking it vigorously.

"I just want you to know," she tells him, "that we're all so proud of you."
Heder's still taken aback by this kind of encounter and quickly tries to turn it into a joke.
"You sure it was me," he tells her, "you sure it wasn't my twin brother?"
"But you're Napoleon Dynamite," she says.
Heder has to admit she's right about that.
"Then we're all so proud of you."

Later, I ask him about this. It wasn't just that older African-American women and aged waitresses seem as far from the Nappy D. fan base can be found, it was that acted like they were so proud of him.

"Maybe they were nerds," he says.
"They didn't look like nerds?"
"Yeah," he agrees, "But for nerds, Napoleon Dynamite wasn't just a movie. It was the story of one of their own who got out there and did something—who showed the world that he can dance."

There you have it. Jon Heder. The nerd who showed the world that nerds can dance.